The Authoritative Life of General William Booth Part 34

Daily Chronicle, _August 22, 1912_

By Harold Begbie

"Scarcely could you find a country in the whole world where men and women are not now grieving for the death of General Booth. Among peoples of whom we have never heard, and in languages of which we do not know even the alphabet, this universal grief ascends to Heaven--perhaps the most universal grief ever known in the history of mankind.

"One realises something of the old man's achievement by reflecting on this universal grief. It will not do to dismiss him lightly. More, it will not do to express a casual admiration of his character, an indulgent approbation of his work. The man was unique. In some ways he was the superman of his period. Never before has a man in his own lifetime won so wide a measure of deep and pa.s.sionate human affection.

"It will not do to say that by adopting vulgar methods and appealing to vulgar people, General Booth established his universal kingdom of emotional religion. Let the person inclined to think in this way dress himself in fantastic garments, take a drum, and march through the streets shouting 'Hallelujah.' There is no shorter cut to humility. Many have tried to do what William Booth did. Many men as earnestly and as tenderly have sought to waken drugged humanity and render the Kingdom of Heaven a reality. Many men have broken their hearts in the effort to save the Christian religion from the paralysis of formalism and the sleeping sickness of philosophy. It is not an easy thing to revivify a religion, nor a small thing to rescue many thousands of the human race from sin and misery.

"Let us be generous and acknowledge, now that it is too late to cheer his heart, that General Booth accomplished a work quite wonderful and quite splendid, a work unique in the records of the human race. Let us be frank and say that we ourselves could have done nothing like it. Let us forget our intellectual superiority, and, instead of criticising, endeavour to see as it stands before us, and as it really is, the immense marvel of his achievement. Our canons of taste, our notions of propriety, will change and cease to be. The saved souls of humanity will persist for ever.

"I remember very well my first impression of General Booth. I was young; I knew little of the sorrow of existence; I was perfectly satisfied with the traditions I had inherited from my ancestors; I was disposed to regard originality as affectation, and great earnestness as a sign of fanaticism. In this mood I sat and talked with General Booth, measured him, judged him, and had the audacity to express in print my opinion about him--my opinion of this huge giant, this Moses of modern times. He offended me. The tone of his voice grated on my ears. His manner to a servant who waited upon him seemed harsh and irritable. I found it impossible to believe that his acquaintance with spirituality was either intimate or real. Saints ought to be gentlemen. He seemed to me a vulgar old man, a clumsy old humourist, an intolerant, fanatical, one idea'd Hebraist.

"Later in my life I met him on several occasions, and at each meeting with him I saw something fresh to admire, something new to love. I think that he himself altered as life advanced; but the main change, of course, was in myself--I was able to see him with truer vision, because I was less sure of my own value to the cosmos, and more interested to discover the value of other men. And I was learning to know the sorrows of the world.

"There is one very common illusion concerning General Booth. The vulgar sneers are forgotten; the scandalous slander that he was a self-seeking charlatan is now ashamed to utter itself except in vile quarters; but men still say--so anxious are they to escape from the miracle, so determined to account for every great thing by little reasons--that his success as revivalist lay only in his powers as an organiser. Now, nothing is further from the truth. General Booth was not a great organiser, not even a great showman. He would have ruined any business entrusted to his management. He would long ago have ruined the organisation of The Salvation Army if his life had been spent on that side of its operations. Far from being the hard, shrewd, calculating, and statesmanlike genius of The Army's machinery, General Booth has always been its heart and soul, its dreamer and its inspiration. The brains of The Army are to be looked for elsewhere. Bramwell Booth is the man of affairs. Bramwell Booth is the master-mind directing all those world-wide activities. And but for Bramwell Booth The Salvation Army as it now exists, a vast catholic Organisation, would be unknown to mankind.

"General Booth's secret, so far as one may speak about it at all, lay in his perfectly beautiful and most pa.s.sionate sympathy with suffering and pain. I have met only one other man in my life who so powerfully realised the sorrows of other people. Because General Booth realised these sorrows so very truly and so very actually, he was able to communicate his burning desire for radical reformation to other people.

The contagiousness of his enthusiasm was the obvious cause of his extraordinary success, but the hidden cause of this enthusiasm was the living, breathing, heart-beating reality of his sympathy with sorrow.

When he spoke to one of the sufferings endured by the children of a drunkard, for instance, it was manifest that he himself felt the very tortures and agonies of those unhappy children--really felt them, really endured them. His face showed it. There was no break in the voice, no pious exclamation, no gesture in the least theatrical or sentimental.

One saw in the man's face that he was enduring pain, that the thought was so real to him that he himself actually suffered, and suffered acutely. If we had imagination enough to feel as he felt the dreadful fears and awful deprivation of little children in the G.o.dless slums of great cities, we, too, should rush out from our comfortable ease to raise Salvation Armies. It would be torture to sit still. It would be impossible to do nothing.

"This wonderful old man suffered all his life as few have ever suffered.

And his suffering arose from the tremendous power of his imagination. At a Meeting he would tell amusing stories, and in the company of several people he would talk with a gaiety that deceived; but with one or two, deeply interested to know why he was a Salvationist, and what he really thought about life, he would open his heart, and show one at least something of its agony. He was afflicted by the sins of the whole world.

They hurt him, tore him, wounded him, and broke his heart. He did not merely know that people suffer from starvation; that children run to hide under a bed at the first sound of a drunken parent's step on the stair; that thousands of women are friendless and defaced on the streets; that thousands of boys go to their bodily and spiritual ruin only for want of a little natural parental care; that men and women are locked up like wild beasts in prison who would be good parents and law-abiding citizens were love allowed to enter and plead with them--he did not merely know these things, but he visualised and felt in his own person the actual tortures of all these peris.h.i.+ng creatures. He wept for them. He prayed for them. Sometimes he would not sleep for thinking of them.

"I have seen him with suffering face and extended arms walk up and down his room, crying out from the depths of his heart: 'Oh, those poor people, those poor people!--the sad, wretched women, the little, trembling frightened children meant to be so happy!--all cursed with sin, cursed and crushed and tortured by sin!' And he would then open his arms as if to embrace the whole world, and exclaim, 'Why won't they let us save them?'--meaning, 'Why won't society and the State let The Salvation Army save them?'

"His att.i.tude towards suffering and sorrow was, nevertheless, harder in many ways than that of certain humanitarians. He believed in a Devil, he believed in h.e.l.l, and he believed in the saying that there are those who would not be persuaded though one rose from the dead. And so he held it the wisdom of statesmans.h.i.+p that when all men have been given a fair opportunity for repentance, and after love has done everything in its power to save and convert the lawless and bad, those who will not accept Salvation should be punished with all the force of a civilisation that must needs defend itself. The word punishment was very often on his lips. I think that he believed in the value of punishment almost as profoundly as he believed in the value of love. He believed that love could save the very worst man and the very worst woman in the world who wanted to be saved; and he also believed that nothing was so just and wise as rigorous punishment for the unrighteous who would not be saved.

I think that he would have set up in England, if he had enjoyed the power which we give to politicians, two cla.s.ses of prison--the reforming prison, controlled only by compa.s.sionate Christians who believe in love; and the punis.h.i.+ng prison, which isolates the evil and iniquitous from contact with innocence and struggling virtue. In that direction this most merciful man was merciless.

"Why he became a Salvationist is very clear. He knew that the centre of life is the heart. He saw that all efforts of statesmans.h.i.+p to alter the conditions of existence must be fruitless, or, at any rate, that the harvest must be in the far distant future of humanity, while the heart of man remains unchanged. He suspected the mere respectability which satisfies so many reformers. Even virtue seemed to him second-rate and perilous. He was not satisfied with abstention from sin, or with the change from slum to model lodging-house. He held that no man is safe, no man is at the top of his being, no man is fully conscious of life's tremendous greatness until the heart is definitely and rejoicingly given to G.o.d. He was like St. Augustine, like Coleridge, and all the supreme saints of the world in this insistence upon the necessity for a cleansed heart and a will devoted to the glory of G.o.d; he was different from them all in believing that this message must be shouted, dinned, trumpeted, and drummed into the ears of the world before mankind can awaken to its truth.

"He made a tremendous demand. Towards the end of his life he sometimes wondered, very sadly and pitifully, whether he had not asked too much of his followers. I think, to mention only one particular, that he was wavering as to his ban upon tobacco. He was so certain of the happiness and joy which come from Salvation, that he had no patience with the trivial weaknesses of human flesh, which do not really matter. Let us remember that he had seen thousands of men and women all over the world literally transformed by his method from the most miserable animals into radiant and intelligent creatures conscious of immortality and filled with the spirit of unselfish devotion to humanity. Is it to be wondered at that The General of this enormous Army should scarcely doubt the wisdom of his first terms of service?

"But towards the end he suffered greatly in his own personal life, and suffering loosens the rigidity of the mind. Those of his own household broke away from him, the dearest of his children died, trusted Officers forsook him, some of those whose sins he had forgiven again and again deserted his Flag, and whispered scandal and t.i.ttle-tattle into the ears of degraded journalism. He was attacked, vilified, and denounced by the vilest of men in the vilest of manners. Sometimes, sitting alone by himself, blind and powerless, very battleworn and sad, this old man at the end of his life must have suffered in the solitude of his soul a grief almost intolerable. But he became more human and more lovable in these last years of distress.

"We are apt to think that very remarkable men who have risen through opposition and difficulty to places of preeminence, must sometimes look back upon the past and indulge themselves in feelings of self-congratulation. It is not often true. A well-known millionaire told me that the happiest moment in his life was that when he ran as a little boy bareheaded through the rain into his mother's cottage carrying to her in a tight-clenched fist his first week's wage--a sixpenny bit. Mr.

Lloyd George told me that he never looks back, never allows himself to dream of his romantic life. 'I haven't time,' he said; 'the present is too obsessing, the fight is too hard and insistent.' Mr. Chamberlain in the early days of Tariff Reform, told me much the same thing. Perhaps we may say that men of action never look back. And so it was with General Booth. He might well have rested during these last few years in a large and grateful peace, counting his victories, measuring his achievement, and comparing the pulpit in Nottingham or the first wind-battered tent in East London with this innumerable Army of Salvation which all over the world has saved thousands of human beings from destruction.

Sometimes smaller men are able to save a family from disgrace, or to rescue a friend from some hideous calamity, or to make a crippled child happy for a week or two, and the feelings created by these actions are full of happiness and delight. But this old, rough-tongued, weather-beaten, and heart-tortured prophet, who had saved not tens but thousands, who could see with his own eyes in almost every country of the world thousands of little girls rescued from defamation, thousands of women rescued from the sink of horrid vice, thousands of men new-born from lives of unimaginable crime and iniquity, thousands of homes once dreary with squalor and savagery now happy and full of purest joy; nay, who could see, as I have seen in India, whole tribes of criminal races, numbering millions, and once the despair of the Indian Government, living happy, contented, and industrial lives under the Flag of The Salvation Army--he who could see all this, and who could justly say, 'But for me these things had never been,' was not happy and was not satisfied. He ached and groaned to save all such as are sorrowful.

"In the last letter he ever wrote to me, a letter that broke off pitifully, because of his blindness, from the big, bold, challenging handwriting, and became a dictated typewritten letter, occurred the words, 'I am distressed.' He was chiefly distressed by the over-devotion most of us pay to politics and philosophy, by the struggle for wages, by the clash between master and man, by the frivolity of the rich, the stupor of the poor, by the blindness of the whole world to the necessity for the cleansed heart. He did not want to establish a Salvation Army, but to save the whole world. He did not want to be acclaimed by many nations, but to see suffering and poverty and squalor clean banished from the earth. And he believed that with the power of the State at his back, and with the wealth now squandered in a hundred abortive directions in his hands, he could have given us a glad and unashamed England even in a few years. He knew this and believed it with all his heart. And he held that his dictators.h.i.+p would have hurt no just man.

He suffered because poverty continues and thousands are still unhappy.

For such men this world can never suffice. They create eternity.

"Others may criticise him. And no man ever lived, I suppose, easier for every little creature crawling about the earth in self-satisfied futility to criticise and ridicule. For myself, I can do nothing but admire, revere, honour, and love this extraordinary old realist, who saved so many thousands of human beings from utmost misery; who aroused all the Churches of the Christian religion throughout the world; who communicated indirectly to politics a spirit of reality which every year grows more potent for social good; who was so tender and affectionate and cordial, and who felt for suffering and sorrow and unhappiness wherever he found it with a heart entirely selfless and absolutely pure.

"Even if The Salvation Army disappeared from every land where it is now at work--and, though it will not disappear, I antic.i.p.ate during the next ten years many changes in its organisation--to the end of time the spirit of William Booth will be part of our religious progress. We cannot unthink ourselves out of his realism, out of his boundless pity, out of his consuming earnestness. He has taught us all to know that the very bad man can be changed into the very good man, and he has brought us back, albeit by a violent method, to the first simple and absolute principles of the only faith which purifies and exalts humanity.

"When the dust has blown away, we shall see him as perhaps the greatest of our time."

The Post of Berlin

"What he aimed at, for the solution of the Social question and the uplifting of the lowest cla.s.ses of people by their own works, a.s.sures for him the respect of the entire civilised world."

Berlin Local Gazette

"In the person of General Booth was embodied one part of the Social question, and, if any man succeeded in bringing any part of it even nearer to a solution one must say it was William Booth.

"His plainness as a man, his genial gift as an organiser, his burning zeal, his self-sacrificing devotion to his aim, prepared and levelled the road for him, and no man, friend or foe, will withhold from him their tribute of high respect as he lies on his bed of death."

The Morning Post of Berlin

"General Booth, the ancient blind man, always kept his glad heart. He was able to point his opponents, who brought up their theoretical maxims against him (and who latterly became ever fewer) to his practical work."

The Berlin Evening Paper

"There has hardly ever been a General who in an almost unbroken career of victory subdued so many men and conquered so many countries as William Booth. His person gained the high respect of his contemporaries through his long, priestly life, and he will ever remain an example of how much, even in a time of confusion and division, one man can do who knows what he wants, and keeps a clear conscience."

Berlin Midday Paper

"In General Booth we have, undoubtedly, lost one of the most successful organisers of the day."

Berlin Day Paper (Tageblatt)

"Whoever has seen and heard Booth in a huge Meeting in Circus Busch will never forget him--the snow-white, flowing beard and the great, upright figure in the blue uniform, with the red-figured jersey, the furrowed face of typical English character, and the finely mobile orator's mouth, with the searching eyes under the n.o.ble forehead, and the prominent nose that gave him almost the aspect of an eagle."